Recent Profile Visitors

And here I thought everyone who got monstrously huge in the last year or two was just intrinsically better at Cybernations than me and everyone I know and everyone who's ever played the game up until recently.

The more time, energy, and ego you invest in CN, the more it actually takes on meaning for you. So I'm not surprised that some of us have been here for 9 years now. I mean, yes it is "just a game," but once you dedicate that much to a pursuit, there's no denying that it affects you in a very real way.

True, realpolitik and OOC friendship do seem to be on opposite ends of the spectrum, but in RL politics there is that third element of values or culture of a nation that influences alliances. Since both of those factors are sorely underdeveloped in most AA's, and even team color has been rendered almost irrelevant by the change to trades, it makes sense that those who don't take the strategic side of things too seriously fall back on OOC friendship factors.
Having strong values and abiding by them really can limit who you align yourself with (or what AA you join in the first place...). Lord knows we encountered that in CoJ and I dealt with a lot of that looking for potential partners in my alliance before that. But considering how much most of us hate the treaty web, wouldn't that be a good thing?
WC: I agree completely with jerdge. There's lots of ways to go about it. In DNA, our DoE created a narrative of a benign but complacent group (completely true in RL) that got overrun by darkness, forcing us into an internal power struggle. If we had decided to do something really aggressive, we'd have been able to say "The werewolves made us do it!"
Cuba: Your description of ODN really gets at the heart of why I posted this. Their approach is so explicitly OOC that it's no surprise that align themselves with just about anyone.

Yeah, I was just throwing out an easy way an AA might get try to get a sense of where it stands on the Peaceful vs. Aggressive spectrum. Considering how most AA's don't really "do" much on their own besides chain into treaty web wars, raiding is one of the few ways AA's distinguish themselves, so it's a shame that we've all but dropped any meaning attached to it.

I don't know how to multiquote on blog comments so I'm just going to try to address as many points as I can directly to the posters:
BMTH: I think you're on the right track, but missing the other crucial peace that Schatt always points out - that you can be friends without being military allies. Especially since most of the interactions you have with people outside of OWF are probably going to OOC, or them just being themselves. In that sense, the OOC/IC cuts both ways, and it's completely okay to roll your buddy's alliance for IC reasons since this is just a game after all. Edit: This was written before your last post, which clears things up a bit. I agree that's it's hard for people to keep their IC actions and OOC buddies seperate.
This gets into KZ's point about realpolitik and personal relationships. I'm not going to deny that personal relationships probably play a big part in RL international relations, but I can't think of an example where my (American) President has announced that he and the Secretary of State have been chatting a lot with the leaders of a nation and having a lot of fun, so we're going to sign a military treaty. That's the level that we're operating on a lot of the time in CN.
Sigrun: Thank you for that post and for illuminating the absurd back and forth that's been going on; I think you're totally right. It's like
A: (IC) You're slaughtering innocent people and looting their homes - you're monsters!
B: (OOC) Uh, who cares, we're just having fun.
C: (IC) That's exactly what makes you a monster!!
I'm guilty of getting sucked into this too, so this blog entry was an attempt to clear the air a bit and at least let us be clearer with each other about our personal uses of the IC/OOC divide.
WC: I think Sigrun put it better than I could about RL CB's and evil. Even though there is a rationale behind the use of nuclear weapons in WWII, people *still* have very strong opinions about it in both directions. President Bush (W.) was called a murderer, war criminal, etc. for the invasion of Iraq, even though the he presented a national security justification for it, and there are potential strategic reasons why it could have been in America's interest. If he had just said "We want their oil and we can take it, nothing personal" I can't even imagine what the backlash would've been like. When I think about politicians who strongly advocate for their national interest alone, what kinds to mind are people who want to do away with all foreign aid, or isolationists. That's a far cry from the untempered use of instrumental violence. Even still, there has been plenty of discussion in recent years about a link between sociopathy and leadership, so I don't use that label in a hysterical way but in an objective, clinical way about a certain perspective on the world.
So I don't mean to say that cloaking one's actions in a fake CB makes them better necessarily, but there is at least a RL need to do so, because the global community doesn't tolerate instrumental violence nearly as much as we do here. I don't expect everyone to take this browser game as seriously as RL, but you'd think after 8+ years and all scheming and arguing and nation building that we invest in it, we could at least try to invest a bit more meaning in our actions.
MV: I think you make a great counter-point about survivalism and tribalism, and maybe our community just hasn't progressed to the point at which value conflicts are a focal point since most of us are just trying to avoid getting stomped. I think most new nations and new AA's couldn't care less about what I'm talking about, and just want protection. So there might be an intersting sort of IC-OOC hierarchy of needs. I'll admit that when I thought Polaris was at risk of getting rolled before Disorder, I didn't care nearly as much about who we had to get on our side to make that happen. It was only after our survival was clealry taken care of that I started to ask myself more about whether the breakdown of the "sides" made any sense at all, and wonder what was the point of the war if there were so many AA's I disliked on our side and relatively peaceful AA's on the other side. I didn't want to go down the path of arbitrary wars that I mentiond in the original post, and stepped away from Polaris for a bit.
jerdge: I chose a blog post because no one reads the OOC OWF for anything other than polls and stats! I agree with the rest of your post though, including the idea that eventually the current pattern we're in will get pushed so far that it collapses and something new emerges. And that if you want to be good you should probably join GPA...or CoJ. But CoJ has dissolved into Polaris, so join Polaris It is true though that neutrals are immune to my criticism, since they're some of the only AA's ever to base their entire approach to the game around a guiding principle.
enderland: I agree with most of your post, though I would point out that at some point Hitler becamse pretty much synonymous with evil, at least in America. There will always be the temptation to appease, bury your head in the sand, or even compromise your beliefs to join up with the "evil" side and avoid destruction. That's just as true in CN as it is in RL, so I don't expect micro AA's to make suicide runs at DBDC (yet). But it would be entertaining if more AA's at least found a way to line up their IC behavior with their position with regard to DBDC. As it is, I think most people on here don't even quite get what the big deal is, since they're looking at it OOC.

I'm not even pushing for anything nearly approaching the RP section, or even talking as formally as Hime Themis. Just having our nation leaders act based partly on some set of principles or values.
Even if people are basically just "roleplaying" themselves as the leader of a nation, I think that would naturally lead to what I'm advocating for. For example, most of us probably have a sense of right and wrong and wouldn't defend someone who completely violates that. We also have cultural, political, and philosphical views that lead us to feel an affinity to some countries over others (e.g., that country (AA) doesn't believe in free speech (limits member speech on OWF), so I don't like them). If these sorts of things were inluded to any degree in the game, it would make things a lot richer. Unfortunately the Fascism vs. Communism feud is the only example of this sort of culture clash that comes to mind.
Aligning with tech raiders even if you don't believe in it is a real conundrum, as Enderland brought up well in that thread just as I was working on this. I think it's a great question and of course even in the real world there's a realism vs. idealism debate. I'd say the problem in CN is that we're so "meh" about RP that a hard realism approach is pretty much the only thing that people even understand, and idealism ("moralism") gets you borderline-OOC attacks for being a nerd, neckbeard, taking things too seriously etc.

This was prompted in large part by a particularly annoying thread here:http://forums.cybernations.net/index.php?/topic/125757-ambition/ but I've wanted to address this topic for a while now.
The point of this is not to stir up IC beef, because even if you hate an alliance IC, this game thrives on conflict and it would be even more lame if we were all treatied to each other.
Mainly, I'm frustrated that politics is becoming even less-value driven and more reduced to "realpolitik" and OOC friendships. I put realpolitik in quotes because I think in order to look past principles or morals for more pratctical concerns, you have to have some principles or morals in the first place. Without that, there's really no compromise or tension in the choices you make - it's just a completely obvious and natural affiinity for whichever side has the bigger numbers.
In other words, if you don't have a moral compass guiding your alliance to help you distinguish who's a good match for you and who's not, then what difference does it make who's on your side beyond your OOC buddies? X mil NS is X mil NS whether it's GOONS or Valhalla or RnR or VE. However, that eventually gets us to a place where in-game friend and foe are completely arbitrary and transient functions of how the ever-shifting treaty web is playing out in that cycle. If all you're interested in is hanging out on IRC with OOC friends and clicking buttons once a year, no problem. Wars will still happen, but there will be no CB or at least no clear reason why those guys over there are the ones you should be fighting, and these guys in your coalition are the ones you're supporting. If you want to treat this game as any kind of political simulator, with an emergent narrative and points of debate to engage in, you're going to be completely SOL.
Some of you might think this is just because Polaris is on the wrong side of the power balance right now, but I'd rather lose a "Good vs. Evil" struggle than win an arbitrary war with no CB, where no one even cares why they're fighting or who's on which side. If we're going to do that, then let's at least pick teams OOC beforehand so we can have an even fight, just for the challenge of it.
So this brings us to DBDC, which as been the focal point of a lot of moral-type discussion. I honestly don't want to spark the same debate going on in that thread, but I have to point out that by any real world standard, or standard by which 90% of AA's operate in CN, DBDC would be considered "the bad guys." Or at least, an extremely aggressive group that doesn't respect the norms that place a check on untempered violence, and that make no effort at justifying any of this. Any country in the modern RL war would face an enormous, global backlash. There would be UN resolutions, sanctions from larger nations, etc. DBDC's behavior is extreme even by CN standards, where we've been too apathetic to care about tech raiding the unaligned.
So my request to you is this: think for one minute about what your nation and alliance stand for, if anything, and wonder about whether your role in the Cyberverse is even remotely coherent or consistent with this position. For instance, if you've outright banned tech raiding, there is probably a reason for that, and it just might mean that the more aggressive, amoral alliances shouldn't be a natural fit. Ask yourselves which alliances IC are a good match for yours. And if they all seem pretty much the same, including yours, then you're starting to see the problem.
If you do this moment of soul-searching and decide that your AA isn't concerned at all about principles, and will do whatever serves it best, regardless of what it does to other people, then congratulations: you're RPing a band of sociopaths. That's awesome! I'm being completely genuine here: people RPing alliances that are bloodthirsty and completely indifferent to law/morals/ethics would be great for the game. But don't support others who do that on one hand, and then play yourselves off as a milquetoast, harmless group of good guys that just wants to get along with everyone. That's incoherent and, more importantly, LAME. You can do whatever you want! Tech raid neutrals! Start rolling tiny AA's just because you can! You don't have morals, remember, and you'll probably have fun.
You see, I don't hate DBDC for doing what they do. I hate the rest of you for being so apathetic about the political sim aspect of the game that it doesn't even register for what it is.
tl,dr: Figure out if your AA has IC values (or no morals at all) and then RP it, and we'll all have a much more interesting game.

Unless you're one of the 5 or so AA's that are typically the target or initiator of global (treaty chain) wars, it's just sloppy FP to be signing the bare minimum of treaties to ensure your safety. If you're alliance X who's under 3 mil NS and you have treaties to multiple spheres, there is almost no chance that things are going to break down so that all of those spheres follow you into battle. You're going to be following them into battle, and so you damn well better make sure that they're not likely to be fighting each other. Not only will this save you the huge headache of figuring out which side you're on (or god forbid, fighting for both), but it will eliminate any reason for someone to specifically target/not target you to draw/not draw in a part of the web that otherwise wouldn't be drawn in

True. After reading a bit more on the use of the phrase, I should've just said it comes down to whether you use it descriptively or prescriptively. It sounds like you're pointing out that we all endorse it in the descriptive sense (e.g.,, "that's just how it is around here"), which I totally agree with. But there are alliances out there that use it in the prescriptive sense, as if the strong should abuse the weak because that's nature, or that the strong are entitled to take from the weak because of their superiority. I think that's one of the few fault lines that runs through this game in terms of ruler/alliance values, although people are so wishy washy in how they portray that that most of the time you can barely differentiate one alliance from another.

I don't think the question is whether might dictates who's on top and who gets rolled, but whether you think that being stronger gives you an actual justification for acting aggressively towards weaker parties. Might makes right glorifies the aggressor for their power and blames the victim for being weak. You could argue that it isn't even amoral per se, but actually a moral system based on the value of power. The line in CN between alliances that are amoral vs. those that actually endorse "might makes right" gets pretty hazy sometimes.

I think a useful point that the OP brings up is how CN is ultimately meaningless apart from the importance that we invest in it. The more we forgo politics and strip things down to pixels and numbers, the harder it becomes to maintain any illusion of meaning here. I'd argue that the inability of most alliances to RP and stick to any sort of value system is even more destructive than no-CB wars.